For the past 25 years, researchers have tried and failed to develop an HIV vaccine, their entire focus being on a small number of engineered “super antibodies” to fend off the virus before it takes hold.
So far, these magic bullet antibodies have proved impossible to produce in people. Now, scientists at The Rockefeller University have laid out a new approach.
They have identified a diverse team of antibodies in “slow-progressing” HIV patients whose coordinated pack hunting knocks down the virus just as well as their super-antibody cousins fighting solo.
By showcasing the dynamic, natural immune response in these exceptional patients, the research, led by Michel C. Nussenzweig, professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology, suggests that an effective HIV vaccine may come from a shotgun approach using a wide range of natural antibodies rather than an engineered magic bullet.
“We wanted to try something different, so we tried to reproduce what’s in the patient. And what’s in the patient is many different antibodies that individually have limited neutralising abilities but together are quite powerful,” said Nussenzweig, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “This should make people think about what an effective vaccine should look like.”
HIV strains mutate rapidly, making them especially wily adversaries of the immune system. But one element is shared almost universally among the diverging strains - a protein on the envelope of the virus called gp140 that HIV needs to infect immune cells.
Prior research has shown that four randomly engineered antibodies that block the activity of that protein prevent the virus from infecting immune cells in culture, but all attempts to coax the human body into producing those four have failed.
So Johannes Scheid, a visiting student in Nussenzweig’s lab who is now a doctoral candidate, turned his attention to the antibodies produced by six people infected with HIV whose immune systems put up an exceptionally strong fight.
The patients represent the roughly 10 to 20 percent of HIV patients who are able to control the virus and are very slow to progress to disease. Their immune systems’ memory B cells produce high levels of antivirus antibodies, but until now, researchers have known little about the antibodies or how effective they are.
With help from Rockefeller’s Centre for Clinical and Translational Science and Rockefeller scientists David D. Ho and Jeffrey V. Ravetch, Scheid and colleagues isolated 433 antibodies from these individuals’ blood serum that specifically targeted the envelope protein - the chink in HIV’s protean armour.
He cloned the antibodies and produced them in bulk, mapped which part of the envelope protein each targeted, and gauged how effective each was in neutralising the virus, said a Rockefeller release.
In the process, he identified a new structure within the envelope protein - called the gp120 core - that had never been recognised as a potential target for antibodies. “It’s the first time that anyone has defined what is really happening in the B cell response in these patients,” said Scheid.